For Two Snowboarders, the Calm After the Fall

KRASNAYA POLYANA, Russia — Danny Davis made his own jump, carving it out of a deep, crusty shelf of snow with the edges of his snowboard. He angled the ramp skyward, smoothed it, gave it a final look and hiked back up the hill.

He came down the treeless mountain and launched himself. He acrobatically spun his body upside down and landed on his face in the soft snow.

Greg Bretz followed. Like Davis, he was dressed like an Olympian, wearing the matching jackets they wore in the halfpipe competition at the Winter Olympics three days earlier. Like Davis, he struck the snow with his face.

They laughed. This time, falling was funny. They were exploring the Aibga Ridge, high above the Rosa Khutor Extreme Park, site of the halfpipe. No one else was around, and they could try their trick again, and again, and again — which they did, until they were flying 10 feet into the air and performing airborne acrobatics that might look at home in the halfpipe.

It was still the Olympics, but it could not be more different from Tuesday, when Davis and Bretz were on worldwide television competing for a gold medal that they had every right to believe they could win.

But it was also a contest that they were not sure they should enter. When Davis was told he had made the team last month, he worried what other well-known snowboarders would think and wondered aloud: Can I have a night to decide?

Snowboarding, more than any other sport, has a strange, uncomfortable relationship with the Olympics. For most athletes in Sochi, the Winter Games are the pinnacle of a career. For most snowboarders, it is something more complex, viewed with ambivalence.

They see themselves as part of a mellow band of outsiders to organized sports, and they differentiate themselves by exuding a combination of nonchalance and dishevelment. No one does it better than Davis. With his long dark hair and hippie persona, he is immensely popular with those who follow the snowboarding world beyond large-scale halfpipe contests, which take place in monstrous, delicately maintained tubes that have little connection to a snowboarder’s natural environment.

The Olympics amplify the artifice. The events are run by the F.I.S., the international ski federation, which snowboarders see as mainstream and old-fashioned, to be viewed with suspicion and disdain. Riders are divided into national teams and required to wear uniforms, which does not happen anywhere else they compete. The halfpipes at the Olympics are rarely up to the standards that snowboarders are accustomed to.

But Davis and Bretz worked hard to earn their spots on the American team, joining the two-time Olympic champion Shaun White and the newcomer Taylor Gold. They understood that the Olympics offered a rare chance to be ambassadors for their sport. And since they had worked so hard and come all this way, hey, they might as well try to win.

Davis and Bretz both fell on their first runs, then fell again on their second. Davis finished 10th. Bretz finished 12th.

And that is when they learned just how much it meant to them.

On Friday, Davis and Bretz carried their halfpipe boards up a series of gondolas at the Rosa Khutor ski resort. And for several hours, they did what they love most. They took a good friend into the mountains, explored new terrain and rode without care.

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Danny Davis, above, and Greg Bretz had the mountain to themselves exploring the Aibga Ridge, high above the Rosa Khutor Extreme Park, site of the halfpipe.CreditJosh Haner/The New York Times

“Oh my gosh, Greg,” Davis said as the newly constructed course for snowboard cross, filled with jumps and banked curves, revealed itself beneath the gondola. “Any way they’ll let us take a lap?”

Maybe they could sneak on with their practice bibs, Bretz replied.

“I don’t know what they can do to us,” he added. “They can’t take away our medals.”

“This is true,” Davis said.

Since the halfpipe contest, the two had kept busy. They spent the hours after the event in the bar of the Marriott with their parents, friends and agent before going to a party hosted by Jake Burton, founder of Burton snowboards.

They were on NBC’s “Today” show Wednesday, and Davis made plans to teach one of the anchors how to snowboard this weekend. They watched the women’s halfpipe finals Wednesday night, witnesses to Kaitlyn Farrington’s upset over Torah Bright, Kelly Clark and Hannah Teter. They went to a hockey game, then to the medal ceremony for the women and for the freestyle skiing slopestyle winners, all Americans.

“The next day, we were like, all right, it’s been 24 hours since we blew it,” Davis said. “We’re over it. Then Kaitlyn won, which is great, but we’re like, yeah, we fell. Then we were over it again, and we went to the medal ceremony. And it was like, yeah, we fell.”

By Friday, the feelings still came and went, swinging between disappointment and indifference. For months, they had treated the Olympics with ambivalence, saying it would be a great experience to go (Bretz was on the 2010 team, and finished 12th then, too), but not be a big deal if they did not. Then they went, and it all went worse than they expected, forcing an internal debate about how much it had really meant.

“I’ve been more disappointed in myself than I expected,” Davis said.

“It’s a terrible feeling,” Bretz said. “We rode so well all season.”

“You can’t let it get you too down,” Davis said. “It’s a ton of hype, but you can’t let it kill you. If this was any other year, I’d feel great about my season.”

“You’d feel like a pipe god,” Bretz said.

“This is probably my best year,” Davis said. “This is a blown-out-of-proportion contest. But I realize it’s blown out of proportion because it’s the one event that the American public knows. That and X Games. Those are the only events anybody asks me about: Oh, do you do X Games and the Olympics? No one ever asks if I do the Grand Prix.”

They were going to stay until the end of the Olympics, to take in the full experience. Now, weary of the constant reminders of their own disappointment, they plan to cut their trip short and head home to California. They want to get on their snowmobiles and go deep into the woods and snowboard in peace — “to get back to the reason we got into snowboarding,” Davis said.

The gondola brought them to the top of the resort. Most of the panorama is snowy, jagged peaks. Through an opening to the south, the Black Sea can be seen about 40 miles away. The terrain — broad, powdery glades and steep chutes — is some of the best they have ever ridden, Davis and Bretz said.

They cruised groomed runs at runaway speed, spraying snow with their carved turns. They dipped through a few steep passages and ran into some friends who joined them. At the top of the highest lift, a group of snowboarders recognized Davis behind his goggles, with his team jacket and long hair, and asked for photographs. A woman stripped out of her jacket down to her bra and cuddled close.

“I wish I could tell you that happens all the time,” Davis said. “It doesn’t.”

And then they found a long, wind-carved wall and decided to make a jump. Davis and Bretz stepped out of their straps and chopped at the snow until they created a ramp. When it looked about right, they took turns flying off it, like the edge of a halfpipe with no one watching. It did not matter if they fell.

“All in all, I think the Olympics is pretty darn good for snowboarding,” he said.